Caste as Performance: Ayyankali and the Caste Scripts of Colonial Kerala

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Vivek V. Narayan

The crowded marketplace in Thiruvananthapuram (aka Trivandrum) thronged with people in the late nineteenth century. Men and women clad in white mundu teemed about the busy street buying oil and salt, horseshoes and iron farm implements, coarse cloth, coir rope, jaggery, and palm toddy. The men were mostly bare-chested, though some, unmindful of the sweltering heat, wore white long shirts or an upper-body cloth. While a few young women wore printed blouses, many, particularly the older women, wore no upper-body clothes except for large, beaded necklaces made of red-colored stones. Most people, with the exception of the men who clothed their upper body, walked along the sides of the road, leaving the path clear for the occasional bullock cart. These bullock carts, also known as villuvandi, carried young men-about-town, almost exclusively landowning, upper-caste Nairs. Dressed in a spotless white shirt, white mundu, and matching white turban, the Nair riding his villuvandi assumed the haughty air of a master surveying his subjects; out to observe his inferiors as much as be seen as a superior. These Nairs, and other upper-caste men and women, had the exclusive right of way, on bullock cart or on foot, the right to wear clean white clothes, and, of course, the right to ride a villuvandi. These rights were codified through caste-based rules or norms known as jati maryada, which governed all aspects of social behavior.

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Bieda ◽  
Anita Kwartnik-Pruc ◽  
Edyta Puniach

Abstract Large-format advertisements are becoming a more and more common element of building facades, especially in city centers. Placing an object of this type is not without significance to the real property management. A large-format advertising billboard on the facade, on the one hand, is associated with the possibility of renting advertising space, on the other - it can lead to the occupancy of a right-of-way, which results in a necessity to pay appropriate fees, in the amount regulated by the Act on Public Roads. Placing an object such as a large-format advertising billboard in a right-of-way requires a permit of the manager of this road. However, if a billboard is located on the facade of a building, occupancy of the right-of-way is not always the case. If the boundary of the road parcel runs along the contour of the building, a billboard placed on the elevation will always occupy the right-of-way. However, property boundaries often run at a distance from the building. Such situations - desired by managers - result in a noticeable increase in demand for surveying opinions to determine what part of the right-of-way is occupied by a large-format advertisement. This article analyzes the cases of the right-of-way being occupied by large-format advertising placed on the facades of buildings in the city center. For selected objects, information was obtained from public records, National Cartographic Documentation Center database, and direct surveying was performed with various techniques. This allowed for an objective assessment of the possible use of available surveying methods and the acquired spatial data to determine the right-of-way occupied by large-format advertisements for purposes of real estate management.


Author(s):  
Catherine McNicol Stock

Since colonial times, farmers and other rural men and women have organized to protect their livelihoods and communities from the powerful interests of centralized governments, big banks, and large corporations. In protests movements spanning from Shays Rebellion in Massachusetts to the Farmers Holiday Association in Iowa, rural people agitated for control over local politics and for reforms to the political and economic system that would protect their interests. The Populist Party of the late nineteenth century is among the most important of these groups, as farmers in the north and south came together to create a new kind of political community.


Author(s):  
Brianna Theobald

This chapter lays the groundwork for the book’s use of the Crow Reservation in Montana as an extended case study. After providing an overview of Crow history to the late nineteenth century, the chapter sketches the parameters of a Crow birthing culture that prevailed in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Crow women navigated pregnancy and childbirth within female generational networks; viewed childbirth as a sex-segregated social process; and placed their trust in the midwifery services of older women. The chapter further explores government employees’ attitudes toward and interventions in Indigenous pregnancy, childbirth, and especially family life in these years, as these ostensibly private domains emerged as touchstones in the federal government’s ongoing assimilation efforts.


1971 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hedley Brooke

Proclaiming Louis Pasteur as the “Founder of Stereochemistry”, the distinguished Scottish chemist, Crum Brown, addressing a late nineteenth-century audience of Edinburgh savants, drew attention—as Pasteur had incessantly done—to the intimate relationship between living organisms and the optical activity of compounds sustaining them. It seemed to Crum Brown “that we must go very much further down in the scale of animate existence than Buridan's ass, before we come to a being incapable of giving practical expression to a distinct preference for one of two objects differing only in being one to the right and the other to the left”. Crum Brown's lecture must have been entertaining, but it was also motivated by a serious desire to do justice to a particular assertion of Pasteur—an assertion which had, moreover, been misunderstood and dismissed by no less a chemical genius than Wilhelm Ostwald. Writing at a time when the majority of his colleagues were stressing the resemblances between inorganic and organic compounds, Pasteur had insisted that he “could not point out the existence of any more profound distinction between the products formed under the influence of life and all others” than that “artificial products have … no molecular asymmetry”. Pasteur was obliged to concede that the chemist might produce enantiomorphic pairs of isomers, but without resorting to a manual separation of crystals he was powerless to imitate Nature's performance, powerless to fabricate by chemical means a separate optical isomer, divorced from its partner. Now it was not only Crum Brown who felt that chemists had brushed aside this proposition of Pasteur. In his 1898 Presidential Address to the chemical section of the British Association, Professor F. R. Japp also complained that the possible vitalistic implications of Pasteur's distinction between natural and artificial products had been misapprehended or tacitly ignored.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leanne Calvert

Until the late nineteenth century, apprenticeship was the main way in which young people were trained in crafts and trades. Given that most apprenticeship terms lasted approximately seven years, young people could expect to spend a large part of their youth in service to another. Apprenticeship therefore coincided with an important phase in the life cycle of many young men (and women) during this period. A study of apprenticeship not only tells us how young people learned the skills with which they made their future living, it also casts light on the process of ‘growing up’. However, we still know little about the everyday lives of apprentices, their relationships with their masters, and how young people themselves understood the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Drawing largely on the diary of John Tennent (1772–1813), a grocer’s apprentice who kept a record of his time spent in service, this article aims to broaden our understanding of these themes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. It demonstrates that, for young middle-class men like Tennent, apprenticeship played a key role in the transition from boy to manhood.


1990 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 384-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.B. Hooker

By the late nineteenth century British control over Burma had been firmly established and by 1893 a comprehensive legal system for its population put in place. The guiding principle of the judicial and legislative system was that each racial or religious group had the right to its own law in matters of religion and custom. Thus, Burmese “Buddhist law” for the Burmese, “Mohammadan law” for Muslims and Hindu law for the Hindus. In addition, the customary laws of other ethnic groups were also recognized.


1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. J. Dewey

‘Cambridge idealism’ – the phrase sounds like a mischievous verbal paradox. Idealism, as Richter has accustomed us to suppose, set the tone of late nineteenth-century Oxford; while contemporary Cambridge, Lord Annan teaches, preserved a tradition of empirical rationalism. At Balliol Green and Toynbee evolved a ‘secular religion’ from the metaphysics of Hegel and Kant; at Cambridge Sidgwick and Marshall embarked upon a rationalist revision of utilitarianism, developing (for the most part) suggestions incompletely worked out by Mill. Green and Toynbee were idealists; Sidgwick and Marshall were rationalists: the differences between the philosophic systems thery constructed seem crystal clear. Yet the contrast can be exaggerated. Whether their fundamental premiss was the principle of utility or the conviction that ‘the Universe is a single, eternal activity or energy, of which it is the essence to be self-conscious, that is, to be itself and not-itself,’ Oxford idealists and Cambridge rationalists were both preoccupied by contemporary social problems, both formulated essentially social philosophies concerned with the right conduct of individuals in their relations with others, and both arrived at comparable policy prescriptions at almost exactly the same time.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Paulami Guha Biswas

This article follows the debate on the implementation of the road cess in late nineteenth-century Bengal. To understand how ‘cess’ was defined, it enters the discussion on the problematic category of the ‘local’. The debate in the official circles mainly addressed two questions: whether ‘cess’ was a legal tax or not, and whether cess should be a local tax or a centralized one. The thematic division of the article coincides with the chronology of the road cess in India. The Bengal District Road Cess Act was passed in 1871. The debate on the appropriate incidence of the tax—whether its burden was to be borne by travellers on these roads, or by landholders for the construction of the roads—had intensified by the 1850s. Decades earlier, in the 1810s, the revenue officers of Bengal set out to inquire into the probable existence of a road tax in Shahabad district of Bihar. This article will trace the protracted stages of the history of the road cess in India from the 1780s to 1900, traversing through the theoretical debates on the Permanent Settlement and the practical experiences of cess collection in various districts.


2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-201
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Spałek ◽  
Maria Mleczko-Król

Construction of the A-4 Motorway section in the Opole Region begun in Summer 1997. Very soon vigorous resistance of ecological NGOs was encountered. The bone of contention was the section of motorway that passes through the Góra Świętej Anny Landscape Park and verges the natural reserve of strict protection Ligota Dolna where rare species of thermophilic plants are sheltered. Between 2011 and 2013 a detailed mycological, geobotanical, floristic and fauna research took place within the right-of-way of the A-4 Motorway section crossing the Góra Świętej Anny Landscape Park in the Opole Region. The survey revealed several rare and protected species of fungi, plants and animals along the road, including the greatest in Poland population of Austrian flax Linum austriacum. The area also harbors the only site of xerothermic grass of Festuco-Brometea class with so many rare and putrefying plant species inside a motorway’s right-of-way in Poland. Given the occurrence of many interesting species of plants and animals in the motorway surrounding it seems justified to establish a system of ecological monitoring, which could provide a range of valuable findings regarding the impact of motorway traffic on surrounding flora and fauna. This knowledge would be very useful for all those involved in construction of next motorways in Poland as well as for a wide circle of interested researchers.


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